High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Red Brick (or "redbrick") is an informal term used to refer to six particular British universities founded in the major industrial cities of England, all of which achieved university status before World War I and were initially established as civic science and/or engineering colleges. Whilst the term was originally coined as these institutions were new and thus regarded by the ancient universities as arriviste, the description has since ceased to be derogatory with the proliferation of 1960s universities and the reclassification of various polytechnics in 1992. Officially, the six institutions are members of the Russell Group (which receives two-thirds of all research grant funding in the United Kingdom).